I’ve had the unfortunate experience of breaking the news to many eBay buyers that the card they spent multiple thousands of dollars on was a fake.

Thankfully eBay has strong buyer protection rules in place along with PayPal guarantees and options to dispute the transaction through your credit card company.  Thus, many of the buyers I’ve spoken to have been able to recover their funds.  

Still, I really hope that eBay can develop a program for sports cards, similar to what they have done with sneakers and watches.  

Despite this, I decided that I should create a guide to help buyers protect themselves from the most unscrupulous of eBay sellers. 

eBay does a good job of shutting down fake listings if enough people complain, but often times many fall through the cracks.  

Note that eBay does require that any cards that have a questionable authenticity be listed as a reprint, yet buyers are still bidding up these cards thinking they’ve found a diamond in the rough.

This guide will help you avoid these mistakes and help you become a better-informed buyer when purchasing sports cards on eBay. 

Vintage basketball card collectors have been pushing up values of Julius Erving’s rookie card of late.  And for good reason, Erving’s 1972 Topps rookie card is a hobby legend, one of the most valuable basketball cards of all time.

The rookie card of one ‘Dr J’ as he was better known, features Erving as a member of the Virgnia Squires, one of the teams of the American Basketball Association (ABA). 

Erving led a storied career, first with the Squires and Nets of the ABA, while finishing up his career with the Philadelphia 76ers.

While Erving tends to get overshadowed by some of the bigger name stars from the era such as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, his rookie card has found renewed interest.  

In this piece, we’ll review the career of Dr. J, while examining his 1972 Topps rookie card, including the existing population, current values and investment potential. 

For many readers (including myself) the T206 Honus Wagner card is mostly out of reach from an affordability standpoint. 

A recent example for the card in Poor condition sold for $1.4 million at auction. 

So unless you have some serious cash hanging around, the Wagner might not necessarily be an affordable investment at the moment.

Still, I thought it might be fun to examine the current values and populations for the T206 Wagner, while trying to see if we might be able to determine a future value for the card.  

Of course this is just an exercise, and nothing in this article should be construed as fact; we are mostly having some fun with numbers to see what the possibilities are.  

Do you have a T206 Wagner card?  Get in touch with me at chris@allvintagecards.com — I’d love to see it! 

Despite the big move in vintage cards over the past few years, I still think there are great opportunities for collectors looking to invest in vintage baseball cards.

While in the past, I’ve advocated for strip cards as an under the radar investment in the hobby, in this piece, I’m going to take a closer look at pre-war baseball caramel cards.

Many vintage collectors often get consumed with early tobacco cards, such as the T206 White Borders set or the T205 Gold Borders set.  

However, many early caramel cards issued around the same time or a few years later, are rarer and often times less expensive. 

So, come along as I offer up ten vintage pre-war caramel baseball cards that I think could be excellent long term investments for vintage collectors.

Vintage basketball card prices have been on a roll of late, fueled by speculation and demand for some of the hobby’s most prized possessions from the past. 

The boom in values has been fairly widespread throughout most of the vintage sports card market, but the flame seems to have really been held to basketball card values.

Why the increase in basketball card prices?  It’s hard to pinpoint an exact reason, just like it’s hard to tell you why Pets.com was one of the most loved stocks at the height of the stock internet bubble in 1999.  

Momentum can be a funny thing.  Using stock prices as an example, once that excessive demand builds in something that everyone wants to own, the underlying valuation of the item at hand tends to get thrown right out the window. 

It’s a lot easier to put a value on a stock then it is a basketball card.  With a company, you can evaluate the profits relative to the company’s value and growth prospects to determine if a company’s stock is over or undervalued.

In our history of baseball cards piece, we discussed at length the history of the Topps baseball card company; from their initial entry with the 1951 Red and Blue Back sets to their acquisition of Bowman in 1956.

In this piece, we wanted to have a little fun and rank all of the Topps sets starting with the ’51 Blue/Red Back issue all the way to the 1980 Topps Baseball card set. 

Now of course, we’ve noted that anything produced prior to 1980 is considered to be vintage, but we figured with this piece, we’d keep it to an even thirty years of Topps issues.  

Our rankings are based on a few different factors:

1) Overall design of the set

2) Star and rookie card power in the set

3) Collector Demand

4) Investment Potential

I’m sure there will be some that collectors disagree with, so let us know in the comments what you think are the best Topps baseball card sets.

For now, we’ve provided full writeups on the best ten Topps sets of all time.  At some point we might expand the writeups for all thirty Topps sets. 

An unopened box of 1948 Bowman Baseball wax packs

Collectors often dream about some of the unopened wax packs owned by Steve Sabow.  Sabow is one of the hobby’s preeminent dealers of vintage wax packs.  In fact, Sabow has sold more unopened vintage wax in the last three years than anyone else in the country.

I had the opportunity to speak with Sabow recently and found him to be an all-around great guy and a wealth of information in relation to buying and selling vintage wax packs. Sabow has been at this for a while; he started out selling cards at flea markets back in 1976 and started branching out into local card shows while also promoting several shows throughout the NY and CT area.

He’s been selling packs since the 1970’s, but it was only recently that he started getting heavily involved with vintage packs.  In fact, Sabow credits his vintage card business as allowing him to stay alive in this hobby longer than most.  He’s had a booth at the National Convention every year except for the first four.

Steve is retired now, but still quite active as a vintage card and wax pack dealer (although COVID-19 has slowed down business a bit). His list of packs for sale is one of the most impressive lists of packs I’ve ever seen.  We’ve summarized our discussion with Sabow, providing some of the most important points for any collectors interested in vintage unopened wax.

The 1933 Babe Ruth Goudey cards (note there are four of them) have been among the hottest vintage cards in recent years.  Given the significant price increase for the cards, many collectors wonder if Ruth’s Goudey cards are still worthy of an investment?

Ruth’s 1933 Goudey cards (despite the significant price increases) remain one of the best longer-term investments for vintage collectors.  The four cards are not cheap by any means, but if you have the funding, Ruth’s Goudey cards should continue to appreciate over the next several years.

In this guide, we take a closer look at the four Goudey Ruth cards and provide collectors with more information on the current values, scarcity, and the ultimate investment potential. 

The four Babe Ruth cards from the 1933 Goudey Gum set.

When collectors think about the best hockey player of all time, the thoughts immediately are focused on one player- Wayne Gretzky.

When Gretzky entered the NHL in 1979, the league hadn’t quite seen a player with Gretzky’s electrifying skills.

His dominance in the league even as a rookie was unheard of, leading to him winning the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player in his first year in the NHL.

Gretzky’s rookie card has always been in high demand, but even forty years later, collectors still view the Gretzky rookie card as one of the most prized possessions in the hobby. 

Let’s take a closer look at Gretzky’s 1979-80 Topps and OPC rookie cards two of the hobby’s most valuable hockey cards.

There’s obviously been a crazy amount of hysteria in regards to Michael Jordan’s rookie card in recent months due to the release of the ‘Last Dance’ documentary on ESPN.

It had us thinking – what other vintage basketball cards might be due for a rapid rise increase in price?

This led us to one card that we think might actually be undervalued — the 1980-81 Topps Larry Bird, Magic Johnson Rookie Card.

I don’t know what it’s going to take — maybe ESPN will come out with a new documentary detailing the legendary battles of Bird and Magic — but it’s clear that their rookie card looks undervalued. 

We’re going to review the Bird/Magic rookie card in more detail and compare it to the Jordan rookie card, comparing pricing and overall population reports.